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Before a comment of my own, and in fairness to Mr. Boersma who I don’t know from Adam, here is the departed post in its entirety

“In an effort to cut down on the significant increase in unqualified candidate traffic, ResuWe Employer companies can charge job seekers $25 to apply to a job.  ResuWe Employer clients have been asking for this feature to reduce the time required to sift through countless resumes and to ensure each job applicant is pre-qualified.

Here is how it works:

Job Applicant views a job online and uploads resume.  Resume is parsed and job specific algorithm determines the candidate’s percentage fit.  Job seeker can only apply if they are a 75% match or above.  Candidate is than prompted to answer up to 8 specific job related questions.  Provided the candidate is a 75%+ fit and answer an acceptable amount of the questions they can apply for the job.  Candidate than is allowed to pay for the application.

What’s the benefit?

Once the job application is complete the job seeker is able to view a dashboard which gives them detailed analytics about each applied job.  On this page the job seeker can view how many total candidates applied, how many people at the employer company viewed their resume, where the company is in the job search (how many interviews) and view feedback from the company hiring managers and human resources.  Companies also have a limited number of applicants who can apply to each job…so the job seekers knows he/she is one of several (versus hundreds of) candidates.

In addition, the job seeker who lands the job receives a sign on bonus of 50% of the revenue from each job.  For example, if the company maximizes 25 applicants for a job at a cost of $25 per applicant the job seeker earns a sign on bonus of $312.5 paid on their 90th day of employment (25×25=625/2=312.5).

To learn more about ResuWe and our innovative line of recruiting software products visit our website at: www.resuwe.com/“

First, I don’t know what a “job specific algorithm” is but it sounds like a keyword matching masquerading as something more technical than that. As far as “candidate’s percentage fit” goes, I suspect that is a similarly meaningless turn of phrase.

Unfortunately, one of the last things that should be used to measure a candidate’s “fit” is a paring of keywords from the job posting to the resume, or vice-versa. If it isn’t bad enough that the majority of job postings are nothing more than regurgitated job descriptions that fail to articulate who the “ideal applicant” could be, or what the real nature of the job is, most resumes are similarly nondescript as far as revealing a candidate’s true make-up and possible fit, job-, organizational-, cultural-, departmental-, or otherwise.

I have yet to see a resume accurately reflect the required attributes over and above “job-fit” as defined by matching keywords. What about the person’s behavioral style, core attitudes and values, cognitive ability and problem solving skills? What about general, corporate, industry and cultural types of disposition, demographic profile, documented results and past achievements, true motivations and underlying interests, and blah-blah-blah? And even if all that could be conveyed on a resume, could you trust it? I doubt it.

Based on this assertion then, only allowing people who score 75% or better to proceed is no more certain to skim the cream off the top than it is to sink the dross back into the applicant pool. Keywords are keywords, nothing more and nothing less.

As far as eight knock-out questions go, bravo! Why not just start with that as the first step in the screening process and have done with all the job-specific-algorithm-vendor-speak? Hey, you could go really bonkers and have the language in your job-posting help people self-select before hitting the apply online button. How’s that for innovative? Or maybe I’m just missing something in ResuWe’s value proposition. Again, I don’t think so.

“Provided the candidate is a 75%+ fit and answer an acceptable amount of the questions they can apply for the job.  Candidate than is allowed to pay for the application.”

I love that: the candidate is “allowed to pay for the application.” Not invited, not encouraged, not prompted, not requested, but “allowed”…to pay!  Well, tank you, tank you, Bwana! Tank you, ResuWe employa sa!

Assuming we have managed to get through the preliminary meat-grinder what is our validated candidate greeted with? A dashboard with detailed analytics about each job applied for. Brilliant, very engaging.

The candidate is not only treated to seeing the number of candidates in the offing for each job [and perhaps he or she is the only one!] but also the employer’s arse-backwards thinking if they do play that stupid “standing room only” game. After all, if this process is designed to ensure only the best qualified candidates get through, why limit the number to be shortlisted before we’ve decided who among them is unacceptably fat and/or ugly and/or too old? That kind of discriminating judgment requires eyeballing everyone…unless there’s an algorithm for that too.

Truly, I cannot say that having $25.00 or not qualifies a surviving candidate for anything other than highly questionable judgment.  Anyone who has posted on the TheLadders can attest to the fact that, more often than not, the only difference between post-and-pray and pay-to-play operations is the amount of money a candidate believes they should have to shell-out for intercession. Baksheesh has no bearing on a candidates credentials for the job.  For employers, “pre-qualification” should mean grease the skids, not grease my palms.

So, on the “my-algorithm-is-better-than-your-algorithm,” and the “your-50% bonus-reward-is-in-heaven” posturing, who can say if this more crap being shoveled onto the ATS compost heap or if there is anything truly innovative here? I am afraid I was lost at “charge job seekers $25 to apply to a job.”

I visited another of the author’s interests, Laguna Source – a search firm that showcases ResuWe. It appears that another innovation is having candidates apply for jobs that could easily be scraped from any number of other places. Now, of course, I could be wrong and I am happy to stand corrected, but it would be a clever move to dull the mind of an unsuspecting candidate with the enticement of a really great job to then whack them for $25.00 to offset the cost of marketing them to another client or even an unrelated employer, don’t you think?

Oh, Monsignor Recruitomatico, what are you suggesting? Surely not everyone is as self-indulgent as you!

For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

In the final analysis, managers and their direct reports need to pick up the mantle of developing their “human resource.” That’s what I say. Recruiting is no less a management task than planning, budgeting, organizing stuff, and troubleshooting.

If the decision to hire and fire is a managers’ prerogative shouldn’t a manager be capable of taking care of the attraction and screening bits too? One might expect to see improved results across the board if they did.

Imagine, no need for template intake calls or getting chewed-out for presenting literal and proverbial misfits; no more waiting for overdue feedback on interest, availability and offers;  no more having to explain that a credit score of less than 590 doesn’t automatically mean salespeople can’t sell, nurses can’t nurse, programmers can’t code, and engineers can’t build missile-defense systems.

Needless to say, there are exceptions to the “looks like managing” modelIn those instances where the need calls for high-volume hiring the issue is not the caliber of the recruiting personnel per se but the process and underlying technologies that are deployed in the name of cost and time efficiencies. If the economies of scale aren’t there then maybe the path of least resistance is to outsource the problem. Even then, the consumer-manager needs to be intimately involved in every aspect of the process, not just selection. The manager should be held accountable for results post-RPO too, why not?

I was told once by a VP of Legacy Thinking that that it makes no sense to ask a $150-an-hour manager to do $75-an-hour “grunt work.” Therein lies part of the problem, viewing recruiting as piecemeal work instead of quantifying its  intrinsic value to the organization, assigning responsibility for its proper execution to a capable manager.  As a result, despite lauding quality-of-hire metrics — however fuzzy — stakeholders continue to demand time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and money-in-the-bank metrics not knowing how else to measure recruiting value.

That said, “grunt work” like sourcing should be passed off to a $75-an-hour bod, and perhaps other elements of the process could be unbundled too. But, when all is said and done, these things need to be delivered in support of the manager, not a recruiting cohort or talent management overlord.

Faced with the possibility of being held accountable for recruiting outcomes, management surrogates like John Sullivan go on the attack.  For the purposes of throwing recruiting under the bus, “failure metrics” will do. Googling those “facts and numbers” keep us from considering the possibility that, instead of getting the bus from point A to point B, when it comes to taking the talent management lead, most  hiring managers are asleep at the wheel.

In defense of the recruiting professionals who are among the most gifted, and in reply to those whiny people John Sullivan’s quotes as saying, “Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip,” I say, “Then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Newsflash! Recruiters don’t make selection decisions, “hiring managers” do.

So, what could a trainer do but compound the problem?

It’s trendy to talk about talent management in the context of strategy and  “best practice.” Invariably we default to transactional recruiting because we are forever driven by short-term imperatives. Maybe a decade of “talent shortages” combined with an institutionalization of JIT and “the arrogance of supply” has deepened the inherent flaws that have doomed modern-day corporate recruiting to the sorry state reported on ERE, not just in John Sullivan’s piece, but repeatedly over the years.

I’m not aware of any new training methods that enable recruiting-centric management thinking over process-driven behaviors, are you? That’s not to suggest training couldn’t enable managers more capable of strategic recruiting. But how do you justify the expense of that when the ROI may be harder to quantify than the number of candidates that over the years never even got an automated reply, let alone a recruiters’ call.

Last, how badly do we want to train our manager-gazumping competition? After all, if we could increase the value of our managers’ contribution by having them grow and develop their people from beginning to end, would we be prepared to pay them what they would then be worth? Probably not.

Consider: If we paid managers a percentage of the their new hires’ first years compensation, and an annual bonus for each one still engaged, managers might spend too much time on end-to-end “talent management.”  Granted, while recruiting may now be at the level John Sullivan imagines is good enough, who will then sign-off on department expenses or decide who gets the cubby-with-a-view when our longest serving team member finally kicks the bucket?

We don’t need better recruiters. Actually, I don’t think we need recruiters at all. We need better support for managers, managers who can grow and develop their teams free from the money- and time-wasting recruiters represent. Those managers who are good at getting the job done, in its entirety, should be rewarded accordingly.

To John Sullivan’s attention-grabbing intent, and  John Sumser’s suggestion that we should “line new employees up with the right people,” I hope my contribution here adds some weight to the scales of wishful thinking.

1. U.K. blogger Katharine Robinson [aka The Sourceress] posts Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference. Hmmm…Nothwithstanding timezones, recruiting unconferences are so yesterday, don’t you know: Jeff Hunter’s Talent Unconference [2007]; John Sumser’s Recruiting Roadshow [2008]; Jason Davis’s RecruitFest [2008/09]; Susan Burns’ Talent Camp [2009] and some I’ve missed, I’m sure. Now, Bill Boorman’s The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November…a sign of the times, no doubt.




2. In Feel Sorry for the Recruiter… Lisa Kaye laments that recruiters “worry if they will wind up on the other side of the desk, interviewing for jobs that well frankly are no longer in high demand.” Look on the bright side: if they ever make it back into recruiting they’ll have a better grasp of what “candidate experience” really means. That should make them better recruiters, don’t you think? [Counterpoint: My Future in Recruiting]




3. In his post It’s all about the message Michael Specht rightly notes: “…that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee,” going on to say, “Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.”I guess shooting the messenger is out of the question then, eh, Michael?

I am answering some of the questions from attendees here, in the comments. Feel free to chip in.

Don’t miss Jim Durbin and his webcast Talent Scouting and Social Networking: The New Employee Referral Program on Tuesday, February 19th, also for HCI. Register here…

I want to thank Dave Lefkow for reconnecting me to this wonderful childhood memory. In his article Why They Hate Recruiting he references a piece published last year in Fast Company. The work was entitled: Why We Hate HR, and at the time it generated its own feeding frenzy of comments and debate. The blob of bread Dave dropped in the pond has again provoked the same frantic reaction. And it is as amusing as it was the first time round.

Please don’t get me wrong. Of course we should be debating issues relating to HR, recruiting, strategy, C-level engagement, strategic direction, the whole megillah. But we should also be conscious of what’s really going on here – here in the pond.

As I reflect on my childhood experience, I wonder whether feeding Mrs. Frostick’s fish was the real attraction for me, or the realization that I – Son of Man – had the power to turn this splish-splashing on and off at will. I conclude it must have been the latter. It didn’t take me long to realize that a glob of spit would have the same effect as a blob of bread. The fish never had a clue.